OCLUG Meeting Coordination: Well, the first one (February) didn't go so well. The projector didn't take the right input, but the speakers did really well keeping the audience entertained nonetheless.

For the next meeting, Robert Love (Ximian/SuSE/Novell) was flown in from Florida. That went much more smooth than the previous meeting, and we now have a more stable projector source (with multiple backup plans, if needed). We had a good number of people show up for this which was great. There is also a good number of people lined up to speak in the coming months, and meetings are booked up until July (which is the month OCLUG usually holds Linux in the Wild, to get outdoors and get some fresh air).

OCLUG Board Elections: A bit of a fiasco right now on the oclug-board mailing list, but at least most of the people complaining are putting their candidacy where their mouth is running for the new board. It should be a fun election. I'm a little nervous - public speaking always freaks me out until the second after I begin talking. It's only a 2 minute speech, though, so it shouldn't be too bad.

My last post here was in October 2003, when I was appointed to OCLUG's board of directors until the election in April. This month, I became the meeting coordinator, so I'm now responsible for making sure everything is set up for the monthly meetings (speakers, projector, etc). Fortunately, the rest of the board is being very supportive and helped me quite a bit for this first meeting - future months will probably go more smoothly (it's also unfortunate that I took on this job with only two weeks before the February meeting).

A member of the OCLUG board of directors stepped down, due to time constraints. I have been appointed as a replacement until the election next April. I have been very impressed with the board's actions and initiatives in the past, so I'm looking forward to working with them.

After taking the summer off, I'm now working (my first job out of university). At the moment, I'm on a 3 month contract (with a possible extension) doing basic XML work. It's not what I want to do as a career but it feels wonderful to be working again, especially now that fall is here.

I have submitted a few more patches to the Kernel Janitors project since my last entry. I'm currently adding loglevels (KERN_* constants) to printk statements all over the source tree which is not very complicated but very time consuming. So far I have patched the Documentation/, arch/m68knommu and arch/sparc directories, with arch/mips in progress.

This weekend OCLUG will hold its annual outdoor meeting, Linux in the Wild. I'll bring my frisbee and juggling clubs, but not my laptop. And of course, one week from today is OLS.

Busy looking looking through prom-libc code for yaboot and following the mailing list discussion. Surprisingly I'm managing to understand it so I should be able to contribute something when new code will be written (which looks to be soon).

I spent part of the afternoon putting together a patch for the kernel janitors project, changing pci_dev->slot_name to pci_name(pci_dev). If any of it gets accepted, it will be my first patch that I contribute to the project (I submitted some trivial patches last year but I don't think any of them were applied). Next I'll probably work on auditing return codes (for request_region, etc). I'm finding this to be a good way to become more familiar with the kernel, now that I have more time to do so. I also have enough time to stay on top of my mailing list subscriptions, too (including lkml).

I had the quietest Canada Day this year - I made an appearance at a friend's party but spent most of the day inside reading. The only exception was when I took a walk downtown so that I could pick up one of the little flags that they have every year.

Adopted the yaboot (PowerPC bootloader) Debian package, my first base package. The upstream maintainer then contacted me informing me that he is currently doing a complete rewrite for version 2.0. So I now have a new project to occupy my time.

Tommorow night, OCLUG is participating in a tour of Magma's data centre, running Linux (Magma is a Canadian ISP). Next month, we have the annual Linux in the Wild event, which is the only meeting that is held outdoors. I missed it last year due to Debconf (not an issue this year with Debconf in Norway).

For the first time in over a year, running Debian unstable has finally bit me in the ass on my laptop (I never had any problems during the three years that I ran it on my desktop, which has now settled on Woody, the current stable version). Now I have no X and a locked-up machine when I try to put it to sleep. Ouch! I'll have to fix that today.

In my last entry I mentioned my discovery of my GPG key being ranked 50th in the global web of trust. At last night's OCLUG meeting, a number of people informed me that I had been bumped up to 49th. A lot of people are getting into GPG now at OCLUG which I think is great. We had a "pick-up" keysigning last night for anyone that missed the official one held during the previous meeting.

Uploaded some new versions of my smaller Debian packages to fix some lintian warnings and bugs. I have yet to get around to working on Login.app but now that this crazy weekend is over, I should be able to find some time during the next few days.

My last entry was almost exactly three months ago and much has changed. I completed my B.Sc.A. in computer engineering at the University of Ottawa and I am now unemployed (at least for the time being). It does however feel good to be out of school and although having no cash flow isn't fun, it's nice to have some free time to read, code and just do whatever I want each day (though most of my weekdays are spent job hunting).

I also moved from just west of downtown to a very central location which I prefer. I went from living alone to living with two other people which takes a bit of adaptation. So far, so good. I even managed to paint my new room fairly well.

Meanwhile, my free software activities were dormant during the school year. Now that the move is over, I'm starting to get back into it again. Just today I fixed bugs in two of my Debian packages (one of them release criticial). Perhaps I'll spend Monday (Victoria Day holiday up here in Canada) re-working my login.app package, which is in need of some attention (and has been for some time now).

OCLUG held another key signing at the May meeting, which means that this is now an annual event. Matthew Wilcox ran it this year which is great. I ran the inaugual event last year but I hadn't even thought of it this year, what with all of the other stuff going on for me. Fortunately, the event seems to have grown in interest and the OCLUG web site now has a pretty graph and tables of the rankings. Cool! And guess who is ranked number one at the moment. :-)

Just over 30 days until I get my iron ring, and then I will finish my last exam on April 30th. I must say that my university experience has been very different from what I expected when I entered nearly four years ago. I'm not sure if I'll ever return, but if I do, it definitely won't be next September, and probably not even the following September.

Meanwhile, Karine was just introduced to RSA in one of her math classes. That's pretty cool because our degrees don't overlap very much, even if many of our other interests do. Sometime this week, we're going to sit down and go over it together so that she can review it for her class, and I can review it for fun. She's a little stronger in math than I am, so maybe she'll point out something that I overlooked during my self-study.

Not much else to say at the moment - still busy with school. Hopefully I will be busy with a new job come May.